Chosen by the Science Fiction Writers of
America, the Science Fiction Hall of Fame represents the best in SF. The first
volume selected the great short stories, this volume collects 11 novellas and
the companion Volume Two B will collect novelets (their spelling). This is,
though, a reprint of a work first published in 1973, which may be why the SFWA
web-site mentions Volumes Three and Four without describing their content – we
have had a third of a century since these stories were collected and many new authors
have appeared whose powers must be recognised.
Included here are John W Campbell’s “Who
Goes There?”, C M Kornbluth’s “The Marching Morons”, Theodore Sturgeon’s “Baby
Is Three”, and – feeling slightly out of place – H G Wells’s “The Time
Machine”. So the subjects include time travel, psy-powers (in the Sturgeon),
alien visitation (in the Campbell), robot threats (in Jack Williamson’s “With
Folded Hands”) and adaptation to alien planets (in Poul Anderson’s “Call Me
Joe”), while the themes include social engineering and de-evolution (in
Kornbluth), alternative politics (in E F Russell’s “And Then There Were None”),
conceptual breakthroughs (in Robert Heinlein’s “Universe”), and repeated
questions of what it is to be human or the equivalent of human. And one story
at least – Lester del Rey’s “Nerves” – was a predictive disaster story.
The members of the SFWA put together a
great selection. They could not recognise, though, even so recently as the
1970s, that every story would gain something or fail to shine so brightly from
circumstances of the time in which it was read.
As 2005 was beginning I found del Rey’s story the
most absorbing, not because it is a story about a disastrous explosion in a
nuclear processing plant, accurately showing what would later happen at Three
Mile Island and Chernobyl, instead I found its significance in smaller details.
Some of those details stand out for being later proved correct, others for
failing to occur, and still others for just being in the news. Del Rey could
not have experienced a plant like his, writing in 1942, several years before
the Manhattan Project went on, yet he foresaw the huge size such a place must
be. Within what is a small town, he concentrated on the doctors and emergency
workers – he foresaw that such a huge plant would still use many unskilled
hands and he foresaw the dangers of radiation burns. He saw that doctors would
want to protect their professional areas, but that “nurse surgeons” would
appear in parallel, reducing the standing of the profession – all questions in
the air as 2004 turned into 2005. On the other hand, he makes no suggestion of
triage in handling the injured, yet that selection process has been one of the
most important developments in casualty handling since the end of the Second World
War, and formed a whole SF sub-genre in the work of James White.
One of the first essays I read in
FOUNDATION was a demolition of the biology and IQ argument in C M Kornbluth’s
“The Marching Morons”. Events seem to have proved Kornbluth right – whether it
is politicians who have refused to clean hospitals on the grounds of cost, or
TV producers who demand the right to make rubbish, or armies which conquer
countries then send home the defeated with their firearms, the Morons seem to
have arrived earlier than Kornbluth thought they would. The SFWA chose this
story in the age of Nixon, but it is re-issued in the age of Bush and it is in
this age that I have re-read it.
In Paul Verhoeven’s ROBOCOP the televisions repeat
the catch-phrase “I’d buy that for a dollar”. Neumeier and Miner, Verhoeven’s
scriptwriters, knew their classic SF, even if they had to add something for
inflation. “Would you buy that for a quarter?” is the question screamed from
the TV screens in Kornbluth’s story.
A prospect forward lies – if very remotely – in
Heinlein’s “Universe”. This universe is one of perception – a social collapse
long before on a generation starship has reduced the residents to peasants and
priesthood. Young Hugh Hoyland has the promise to become a scientist (i.e. an
intolerant medieval cleric) when he is forced to realise that he is on a finite
vessel and that it could be repaired – but he can only do so if he can persuade
everyone on board to return to the mission. As the story ends his first group
of missionaries have been massacred and he wonders if he will ever be able to
spread the word. It is the story of St Paul turned upside down. We know that
Paul, like his pale Galilean, conquered; can Hugh likewise persuade as he was
persuaded?
And perhaps that is the strength of SF, exemplified
in these stories. Don’t they always provoke another question?
|